Dancing at the Castle: Growing Up in Old Saybrook

By Jane M. Gullong

Dancing at the Castle, a memoir, is the story of an American girl coming of age in the 1950s on the shore of Long Island Sound. It is set in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, where Katharine Hepburn also lived, enjoying the same view of the lighthouses at the mouth of the Connecticut River.  Growing up, the author found work and love in the shorel

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jane Gullong
• Release date: Apr 2, 2018
• ISBN: 9780692064597

Book preview

Growing Up in

Old Saybrook

Once upon a time Old Saybrook was the most glamorous place on earth. Striped, canvas-slung beach chairs lay in the little yards. There was dancing at the Castle. We drove big Buicks with white fins, and our rich relatives had a cabin cruiser. We waited for the high tides of early September for one last swim. Lighthouses marked the shore, and there was crabbing in the creeks. The place was alive with celebrities. Katharine Hepburn was at home in Fenwick. A movie starring Doris Day was being shot in nearby Chester, and it was even named for me, It Happened to Jane . Troy Donohue came to Essex to make Parrish . We were on the straw-hat circuit, so I dressed up in my Fair Isle sweater and went to matinees with my mother at the Ivoryton Playhouse.

Old Saybrook was the place where I grew up. We called it Down the Shore long before I had moved to New York, where they think the shore is down in New Jersey. This is the place where I learned to work. Waitressing was a virtual internship for my career in fundraising, where customer relations was the key to a good tip and later a generous contribution.

Old Saybrook was the place that I left to make my way in the wider world. But I returned as a daughter, a mourner, a caregiver, and a sister. And I am returning again to remember the place on Long Island Sound where the story of my life began.

At the wheel of a small fiberglass speedboat, entering the mouth of the Connecticut River at age 16, I was a Valkyrie with the wind in my face and my eyes on the red bell buoy to starboard. Flying along the breakwater between the outer and inner lighthouses, I was the captain of my tiny craft. Old Saybrook was ground zero on the compass. I was beginning to chart my own course, eager to fly free with yet no thought of what it would mean to return again and again.

Growing up in Old Saybrook meant not only coming of age, but watching my parents grow old, leaving them once, and then later again forever. Growing up in Old Saybrook, bathed in its glamour, its romance, and its sunsets, I have never been able to completely leave its shore.

Kate and Me

Like me, Katharine Hepburn kept Old Saybrook figuratively on her right, a home place where she would and could always return. When her voice in the PBS documentary trembles, I wanted to get back to Old Saybrook, our town gets its place in the history of Hollywood royalty.

Katharine Hepburn was from Hartford, like many of us who spent summers in Old Saybrook. Like my family, hers made trips down the shore, theirs probably in a sporty 1913 touring car, mine in a white-winged 1959 Buick.

The summer life of the Hepburn family in Fenwick, a borough of Old Saybrook, is resonant of the fun, the games, the visitors, and the conflicts that so many of us remember in Old Saybrook summers of our own. We love celebrities for their glamorous lives, so different and remote from ours. But we love them all the more for all that we have in common.

Seeing Kate was a sport in Old Saybrook. We saw her in Patrick’s Country Store buying flannel shirts (she was the only woman in New England who looked good in one). We saw her coming out of Miss James’s Pharmacy. We saw her on the golf course at Fenwick. Seeing Katharine Hepburn was like sighting a rare bird—an osprey, a crane—glimmering with celebrity in the tall grasses off Saybrook Point.

The golf course at Fenwick, open to the public, must be among the tiniest and prettiest little golf courses in New England—nine holes, most of them with views of Long island Sound, the grand Fenwick cottages, or the north cove of the Connecticut River. On a rise you can see the inner and outer lighthouses. But the prize was seeing Kate swinging a club before returning to her rambling, white waterfront house.

Even better was a chance to hear her remarkable familiar voice. The voice was at once moneyed, New Englandy, actressy, Philadelphia-y and icy cool. But it was always wavering on the edge of a deep-veiled emotion, even if she was only ordering cold cuts at Walt’s Market.

For the most part we left her alone. We knew that good fences made good neighbors. There was a sign at the head of the dirt road to her house in Fenwick that could only have been composed by the clear-spoken Kate herself: Please Go Away. Just in case you didn’t understand No Trespassing. Most everyone in Old Saybrook did keep out. But we kept watching.

Katharine Hepburn was never my favorite movie star. I liked Elizabeth Taylor and Rosalind Russell. I liked their warm, dark sexiness. When I was 13, I had their pictures on the dividing wall of my room upstairs at our cottage on Cornfield Point. Kate was cool and a little disdainful, a little too reminiscent of my own mother, a girl from northern Maine. By the time Kate was the right age to star in On Golden Pond, I started to appreciate her virtues. Her loyalty, tenacity, and courage reminded me of my mother as well.

The Hepburn family bought their original house in Fenwick in 1913, around the same time that our cottage on Cornfield Point was built. Dr. Hepburn, Katharine’s father, is said to have called Fenwick Hartford on the rocks. My own witty father named our cottage The Breakers, a reference to the price, the surf, and the mansion in Newport.

Dr. Thomas Hepburn was a urologist specializing in venereal disease, and his wife, Kit, was a suffragette, working first for the women’s vote then as an advocate for birth control. Still Hep and Kit didn’t approve of Kate’s interest in the theater, just as my parents, Dot and Bud Gullong, took a dim view of my move to New York City to work in the arts.

Like me, Katharine Hepburn brought her friends and lovers home to Old Saybrook. She drove up with her college girlfriends from Bryn Mawr. She drove up from New York with her future husband, Luddy Smith, in his Ford Model A. Once she was working in Hollywood, her beaus